You’re a busy creator and you spend your days making things (songs, stories, poems, essays…) that fill you with passionate excitement and purpose. When you wake in the morning, your thoughts fly to your latest projects. You are eager to get to the piano, the page, the harp, the stage, the laptop, the studio. When you are away from your creating, when you are trapped in a meeting, when you are passing from one place to another, you can still find the energy of your making within you. It burns and shimmers and warms you. It’s the most delicious secret, the most powerful source of fuel, pride, happiness, and hope.
But there are questions sometimes, aren’t there?
In weary or fearful moments, you become susceptible to doubt. Someone’s voice disturbs the peace in your mind and asks:
Who cares about all this creating?
How much did you earn from that song/story/poem/essay/performance? Oh! Only that?
What does all of this creating do for the world? For you? For anyone?
Who do you think you are?
And then it sneers:
No one will remember any of this when you die.
This week my dear friend Lauren and I made the pilgrimage out to Amherst to visit the Dickinson Homestead. We were very fortunate to meet up with an eloquent and knowledgeable young tour-guide who gave us an hour of poetry, humor, inspiration, conjecture, and stories. We were both deeply moved by her presentation and by Emily’s commitment to her own art. Emily decided early on that she was a creator, that her greatest pleasure and purpose on earth was thinking and catching the “mint” of inspiration as it fell all around her. She penned some 2000 poems in her lifetime, and one year, when she was 32, she wrote a poem almost every day. Despite some discouragement and her own disinclination to market her work for publication, she never wavered in her creating. She seems also to have had great faith in her own genius and to have seen herself as part of a large and vibrant world of creators. I loved seeing portraits of two of her heroes, George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, on her bedroom wall.
And yet, when she died, all of those poems – all of that fiercely and joyfully lived life – nearly vanished into a parlor fire when her relatives found themselves uncertain what to do with her legacy. In the end, her sister Lavinia prevailed upon their brother’s lover, Mabel Loomis Todd, to edit and publish the poems (which was a herculean task, given all the alternatives Emily penned in the margins). Emily died in 1886 but a complete edition of her work didn’t appear until 1955. It really is nothing short of a miracle that we know about her, that her work survived, that caring people took an interest and recognized her gift.
Just considering how near we were to NOT knowing Emily, this genius creator, left us both dizzy and somewhat shaken.
And that necessarily raised the question of our own work. Will any of it endure? And leaving aside the issue of whether or not it belongs in the same category as Emily’s genius, how do we reconcile ourselves with the great possibility that all of this joyful, busy, intense creating might not survive in this life, much less the eternity that lies beyond it?
I have no easy or comforting answers to these questions.
Neither did Emily, I imagine. Like us, she created amid immense question marks. She never knew that she would one day be mentioned in the same breath with the writers she most admired. She never knew that people all over the world would devour her words, argue over them, find solace in them, feel a kinship with her through them. She didn’t know that those 2000 poems would live beyond her.
But she wrote them anyway.
And thank heavens that she did! That’s the central point of all of this: she DID write them, giving them a chance to survive and to reach us, to strengthen and delight us. If we are all making this world together – and I truly believe we are – Emily did her part. She made her peace with eternity by creating in the present. And even if these poems had been consigned to the flames, she still would have done her part not just for us and for all creators but for herself. Just that – choosing to spend a life making poems – is a powerful declaration of freedom that reverberates even now. She spent her days making poems and wisely let eternity take care of itself.
Thank you, Emily. You help me answer that snide voice:
I don’t have to know where any of this is leading. I don’t have to be famous or earn high fees or win critical acclaim. I don’t have to do anything.
But I choose to create today, and I choose to believe that it matters.
And now, back to the shadows with you, sneering one. I’ve got a poem to write!
